Cold Migration

Cold migration is the migration of a powered-off virtual machine. With cold migration, you have the option of moving the associated disks from one datastore to another. The virtual machines are not required to be on shared storage.

The virtual machine you want to migrate must be powered off prior to beginning the cold migration process.

If a virtual machine is configured to have a 64-bit guest operating system, vCenter Server generates a warning if you try to migrate it to a host that does not support 64-it operating systems. Otherwise, CPU compatibility checks do not apply when you migrate a virtual machine with cold migration.

A cold migration consists of the following tasks:

1	If the option to move to a different datastore was chosen, the configuration files, including the NVRAM file (BIOS settings), and log files are moved from the source host to the destination host’s associated storage area. If you chose to move the virtual machine's disks, these are also moved.
2	The virtual machine is registered with the new host.
3	After the migration is completed, the old version of the virtual machine is deleted from the source host if the option to move to a different datastore was chosen.